To aid research on 'Reshaping Governance in a Liberalizing China: A Study of the Ethnically Unmarked Chinese Hui Muslims,'

In contrast to the admiration the Chinese government often receives from the world for its impressive economic achievement, its treatment of religion and ethnic minorities has come under incessant attack from around the globe in the name of human rights protection. This research studies a particular minority group in China that is situated between religion and ethnicity. The Hui are ethnically unmarked (physically and, to a large extent, culturally indistinguishable from the majority Han) and stand in a disputed relation to Islam (some Hui find their identity defined solely by their Muslim identity, while others vociferously reject this religious definition and insist on a secular ethno-nationalist one). This research is based upon two years of fieldwork in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The research addresses how the separation between the religious and the secular socio-ethnic affairs is discursively constructed by a series of governmental regulations on religion and ethnicity and how this separation affects the ordinary Hui. It also analyzes the history and the current forms of the United Front (the major strategy deployed by the Communist Party to cope with religion and ethnic minority in contemporary China), the intricate ways this strategy works either for or against the logic of governance formulated more openly by the State Council, and how this strategy produces internal conflicts within the Hui, producing peculiar forms of subjectivity on the side of the Hui officials. The research examines the complex history of Hui-Han interaction, especially the debate on Hui ethnicity in the Republican period, how this history is inscribed on the body of the Hui, etched into its depth, and how this history puts the newly converted Han Muslim in a paradoxical situation. And, finally, it addresses Chinese intellectual and scholarly discourses on the politics of ethnic minority, especially those that draw an analogy between neo-Confucianism and US liberal constitutionalism as the framework for multi-culturalism.